Thankfully, all the negative buzz about this aspect of the game has reached United Front Games. "It's something we're working on.... The way that our technology was built we were able to keep file sizes really, really small for transfer times of less than a second or a second and a half," Dan Sochan of UFG told IGN. "We didn't want it to be so that you and I go online and you want to try a track I've built that's 50MB and then have you have wait five minutes to download it."

The problem is that keeping the file sizes small means the game's models and environments must be built on the fly... and that takes time. "The challenge with that is we're building an entire world, an entire character, an entire kart, and 12 characters online, all on the fly. There's a lot of compositing that happens with the stickers and all the different parts. Because of that, there are longer load times, but that's something we're working on for one of our first patches, to improve that and get that down significantly."

Let's hope this issue is fixed very close to launch. With the loading times under control, a great game is going to become nearly perfect. We'll be keeping an eye out.